I grabbed an old cookbook from a shelf the other day, and an index card slipped out. In the sturdy hand that once belonged to me, a recipe for “chicken-ham roll-ups” was carefully written in faded marker pen. Ah, the memories it evoked! It was circa 1974, and I clearly recalled being in the kitchen of a Victorian house in Madison, Wisconsin, with my friend Cyd, lining up ingredients on the countertop as we began preparing dinner for our hoped-for boyfriends, Steve and Doug.
Not only that, Cyd and I had decided to pretend it was the early 1950s, and we wore lipstick and flower-print bib aprons over sweaters and skirts that clung to our curves. We parted our hair tightly down the middle and clipped it into vaguely pompadour-ish rounds. We were silly and giggly and ridiculously excited.
The recipe must have been copied from a magazine clipping or the back of a soup can label. It certainly wasn’t Julia Child, but it was our idea of sophistication because it involved a quarter cup of “Chablis or other dry white wine.” I laugh when I read it now — basically it involved rolling slices of boiled ham around skinned, boneless chicken breasts secured with toothpicks and browned in a skillet and stirring in a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup, plus that dry white wine.